I
Xenophon Curry, impresario extraordinary, sat sipping his breakfast coffee and perusing the morning paper. He looked extremely optimistic.
The day before he had shown an obliging chandlery clerk over the Skipping Goone, “upstairs and down,” and the clerk had an eagle eye for such missing items as deck hose and cabin door knobs; and though the clerk was but a humble clerk, and although his contribution to the progress of events was frankly minor, the impresario nevertheless felt himself appreciably nearer the realization of his daring project. He and the clerk had partaken of ice cream soda together afterward in a queer little confection emporium near the waterfront. And, all in all, it had seemed a highly important day.
Another cause for optimism was the fact that rehearsals were going surprisingly well. He would make people sit up after the tour had got under way! Indeed, his songbirds were artists to be proud of—not so much, perhaps, because of special genius as for their almost uncanny sticking proclivities. It was, in truth, an organization of the most amazing sort, which had built itself up gradually about Xenophon Curry’s vast heart. Surely no organization was ever before so supremely an affair of the heart. Curry had drawn his songbirds to him from all over the world. Essentially a cosmopolitan himself (“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool hybrid”) he had kept open house in his heart for all sorts and conditions of people. Under his wing, one by one, he had gathered the struggling, the discouraged, the heavy-laden—even a soul now and then that called itself plainly down and out. And not only songbirds, but a tiny orchestra had been drawn in, too, by patient degrees: now a violinist with aspiring soul rescued from some dreadful little café chantant in Vienna; now a flute player off the hills of Sicily; again a lowly snare drummer in a band somewhere in Kentucky, who had a deep-seated passion for the kettles. They knew they could count on him to the last ditch, and so were willing to follow anywhere he led. It was really a little touching. Certainly in no other way would it have been possible for Mr. Curry to do the things he had done, for, from a worldly point of view, no impresario, barring none, ever met with such shocking and consistent adversity.
Over his eggs the impresario read of an auction sale to be held that afternoon at Crawl Hill and the list sounded promising. Mr. Curry made it a point to attend auctions whenever possible, for in this manner he was sometimes able to pick up odd bits to use as properties in his necessarily heterogeneous productions. He decided to stroll around and nose for bargains that might fit into the world tour.
The weather being delightful, Curry literally did stroll. But when he had at length covered some considerable distance he began to ask himself where Crawl Hill was, after all. He remembered it vaguely, and was certain of the general neighbourhood; but just how to get there was developing into another matter. He would have to begin inquiring. He half paused. And as he did so a pleasant voice challenged him at his elbow.
The impresario turned and faced a tall, quite handsome lady, near his own age, gowned expensively and somewhat complexly. Her eyes were frank, her demeanour that of one who has been much about and feels at home in the combinations of a moving life without sacrificing a rather unusual fund of freshness.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, smiling easily and just a little grandly, “but I wonder if you could tell me how to get to Crawl Hill?”
Mr. Curry’s face lighted humorously. “A moment more and I might have put the same question to you.”
“Oh, I see!” she observed, simply and even graciously, much as though they were old friends. “Quite a coincidence—isn’t it? I thought I knew perfectly well when I started out, but this part of the city has changed so!”
“Lord, hasn’t it! Crawl Hill used to be one of those big places”—he enlarged a little upon the circumstances, adding: “Since we’re both headed for the same auction, we might walk on together, and I’ll ask the way.”
“It’s very kind of you, I’m sure!” she told him, her manner more than ever gracious.
So the stroll was thus resumed, and Mr. Curry was struck with the peculiar ease he felt from the very beginning in his new companion’s company. Their talk, as they proceeded, widened gradually to embrace a considerable range of subjects: cheerful commonplaces—just, as a contemporary puts it, “the talk which goes up the chimney with the spark of the wood fire.” Discreet, polite side-glances revealed, for him, an undoubtedly romantic lady nearly as tall as himself, vaguely lavish, just faintly overpowering in her enthusiasms, who walked along with free, hopeful stride and lifted her arching brows in an unbroken expression of communicative pleasantness. She wore a cloak made from an Arabian gondura—a fabric of rusty plum with intricate embellishment of bright green braid. There were wide flowing sleeves; and underneath the cloak one now and then caught sight of confusing details; a bit of Paisley, blue serge, large decorated brass buttons. Her hat was an oddly shaped straw with an ample feather falling off behind.
The lady, for her part, quickly noted his air of bustling optimism and seemed responding to it with unconscious warmth; at first, it is true, she had eyed his rings and general air of the exotic with some slight twinges of doubt: but after she had received one or two of his radiant smiles it was only too plain she felt it would be unhandsome to hold so small a matter against him. Indeed, he seemed to perceive in her at once an element of happy tolerance, at the same time that he was very sure he caught a genuine passion for the artistic. Above all he couldn’t but be impressed with the uplifting and flowing quality in her rich voice. “I learned about the auction from some friends who have been spending months in Morocco, where they heard about Mr. Hoadley’s death and immediately thought about the lovely ‘things’ every one remembers having seen in his house here in San Francisco!” Her sentences, inclined to be “Germanic,” moved with the liquid fluency of a wide, well-mannered river. And there were words she stressed saliently or perhaps rather lingered over; it was a little quaint. One came to listen for them. Other words, too, which, by the most marvellous yet wholly artless subtlety in shading, she managed to slip within quotation marks—although, as a matter of fact, there was seldom any real reason for their being quoted. “I don’t expect to find a thing that I’ll really buy, for everything’s sure to be quite dear, you know, considering how immensely rich Mr. Hoadley was when he did his collecting, although it’s always pleasant to just visit these ‘sales’ and look around and perhaps pick up some little trifles that catch one’s fancy—as trifles have such an irresistible way of doing!”
II
Crawl Hill, when at last they reached it, proved to be a tall frowning old house, whose once considerable grounds had shrunk to a mere wisp of withered lawn. Within they breathed a heavy mustiness. It was a bit ghostly, too—decidedly a place to be visited by daylight.
And as for the little adventure—well, it didn’t, after all, lapse at the door. Mr. Curry, as they moved on together through the crowd, told himself there was nothing so very unusual in their having met like this. He was always meeting people—was a Bohemian—freely admitted it. But was this lady a Bohemian also? And who was she? He was on the verge of learning, and the method was rather happy.
It chanced that somewhat apart from the throng stood a satin-wood console of the French Renaissance period, on which reposed an ornate silver card tray. She liked the tray—“not that one would really want it, you know, for of course it is a little ‘overdone’; but it reminds one of the Victorians—doesn’t it?—and I think there was much to admire in them, although it has become the fashion to sneer at their dust-catching ‘ideas.’”
And the tray gave Mr. Curry an unexpected cue. He smiled and drew out his wallet, then, selecting one of his cards, tossed it humorously down. Her eyes lighted quickly, and, without a word, she brought out one of her own, too, and placed it beside his on the tray. Then they stood there side by side, like two absurd children, reading each other’s cards. Hers was very modest and simple: Flora Utterbourne, with no address. But his, being so ambitious, not to say overwhelming an affair, naturally called for a small smiling effusion on her part.
“I know you by ‘reputation,’ though I’ve never had the pleasure of attending one of your performances. It’s always sounded so interesting!”
And then—well, then he just plunged in and began telling her all about the world tour; and she suggested they sit down “in those delightful Lorenzo di Medici chairs;” no one would object, she was sure; and if they wanted to sell the chairs before he had finished telling her about the world tour, why then they would just move over to “that ‘Huguenot’ bench in the hall, which is sure not to be ‘put up,’” she laughed, “until quite the last thing!” So they sat in the Lorenzo di Medici chairs while the auction hummed on about them, and he opened his ardent heart, and she followed everything he said with an immense facial responsiveness. (Sometimes people found this a trifle disconcerting, because her feeling about whatever you were saying had a way of seeming just a bit stronger than your own.) And, in her large, rich, impulsive way she would keep interrupting him with fragments of delighted appreciation. “By Schooner!” for instance: “but this is the most amazing thing I ever heard of!” Or again: “No crew, but a fresh coat of paint!” She could grasp the essential high points of humour in a situation and bring them together; yet there was nothing the least satirical or mocking. The impresario felt on friendly turf, and deluged her with eager, bustling words. He became inspired, impassioned. He gestured a little wildly. But she found it all wildness with an appealing tang, and rejoiced in the current of his really electric enthusiasm. When he had finished, his whole eloquent person relaxed slowly. Mr. Curry was like a superb engine, which couldn’t be expected to cool off just in a minute.
III
A gate-legged mahogany table had arrested Miss Utterbourne’s notice. She calculated its fineness with an eye accurate from long and loving experience. She became enthusiastic, and finally, smiling excitedly at the impresario, whispered: “I’m going to bid on it!”
Of course Mr. Curry at once took a step and cleared his throat, gallantly ready to do the actual bidding for her; but he was surprised to find himself wonderfully eclipsed by the lady herself, who pressed resolutely up through the crowd toward the auctioneer, her manner all at once proclaiming her an adept at this sort of thing.
“Fifty!” she tendered firmly.
“Fifty-five,” countered a man with cold eyes and shiny elbows.
“Sixty!”
She was serene and undaunted, and the opponent withdrew at seventy-five.
“I got it!” she exulted, giving her head a small toss. “And of course an absurd ‘bargain,’ considering its unusual size, though a less expensive one would have served my purpose, if it weren’t that ‘gate-legged’ tables are my special weakness!”
He couldn’t conceal his astonishment. “You went after it as though you made a real business of such things.” And she had another of his fine smiles.
“Well, you see I do—in a way!”
“What! A business of bidding at auctions?”
“Oh, no,” she laughed, “my ‘business’ is apartments!”
“Apartments!”
She had put on her gold-rimmed nippers, and they straddled her nose in a humorous, faintly pompous manner. “It’s the only way I can gratify my craving for rare and ‘intriguing’ possessions! You see I take an apartment, furnish it with all the lovely ‘things’ I couldn’t afford for myself, and then turn the key over to a tenant who will pay me the difference!” Her face displayed tokens of the anxiety which belonged to an at length pretty involved background of sub-leased domiciles. “Of course,” she confessed, speaking now slowly, almost cosily, “it’s always a pang to move out, though there’s the new apartment to begin ‘planning,’ and then,” her voice dropping a little and her eyes smiling in a deliciously sly way behind their friendly nippers, “I sometimes just have to slip a few things along with me—my tendency is to ‘over-furnish’ anyhow.”
He by no means missed the note of pathos in her brave little scheme; yet she had assured him, too: “You’d be surprised how settled I manage to feel in the midst of what, of course, in one sense, doesn’t really belong to me!”
“That’s the only home you have, then—the home that only lasts until it’s furnished?”
“Yes,” she slowly admitted, “I’m afraid so. Sometimes there does seem a good deal of ‘irony’ deep down underneath everything!”
“Ah!” sighed the impresario, though a radiant smile broke through in spite of him, “no one understands such things better than I. Life’s just full of irony, isn’t it?—whichever way you turn!”
“My brother, Captain Utterbourne,” she observed, “has all sorts of subtle theories about it, though I never can remember just how they go afterward, since, you see, he has a way of ‘conveying’ so much and yet really saying so little!”
There was a breath of musing silence between them, and then Mr. Curry’s eyes lighted suddenly. “You mean—a sea captain?”
“Yes,” she told him, “although I often feel it’s more a hobby with him than exactly a profession.” Her smile was full of humour and a kind of furtive family loyalty.
“I wonder,” ventured the impresario impulsively, “if your brother would be willing to help me—that is, give me a little advice....”
“Oh, I see!” she cried, quickly catching the drift behind his eagerness. “About the ‘world tour’! Of course,” she hesitated, “Christopher is sometimes a trifle set in his ‘ideas’ about how things ought to be managed: but he knows hundreds of ‘seafaring’ men—some of them really quite remarkable; and unless he should get swept away from us on one of his whims of ‘perversity’, I’m sure he could get your schooner equipped with something more than a coat!”
Curry’s delight was almost speechless. He ardently scribbled his San Francisco address on one of his cards, and she put it carefully away inside her bag—a large and complex bag, which the beholder could not but assume entered conspicuously into the manipulation of a complex existence.
IV
Flora, full of her new theme, went straight to her brother about it that very evening. “Oh, Chris—such an interesting impresario—clear around the world in a schooner: the Skimming Duckie, or something like that—quite daring and original”—it was just a little breathless and sketchy at first. But her brother bantered, in his freezing way: “You make it all crystal clear, Flora. A schooner?” And then he shouted. He did not laugh, he shouted. It was a little uncouth; but the Captain liked to be a little uncouth sometimes. It helped him with the sea captain atmosphere, which, after all, as has been suggested, wasn’t quite a native emanation. Utterbourne had perhaps out of sheer perversity taken to the sea, and made a success of it; yet he had a meditative, quizzical trend of mind, and leaned a little to hesitancies, a great deal to analysis. He was an enigma of the first water; yet to those who knew him best it sometimes seemed as though he possessed the heart of a mystic—almost of a poet.
“Oh, well,” was the upshot of the talk, “if you like. I’m busy—h’m? But tell him to phone in for an appointment.” The tone was one of cold generosity, which never failed more or less to frighten the listener—a stab of formality that not even his own sister could hope to escape.
But she didn’t mind in the least, even though she may have been a little frightened. She just arched her fine brows gratefully and said: “Thank you so much, Chris! You’ll never regret it, I know, and he’s really quite celebrated, in a way—though I presume the ‘world tour’ will add a great deal to his fame!” And her hand rested a moment upon her brother’s responseless arm.
Well, in no time at all the excited impresario was phoning for an appointment. Then he called at the smoky offices of the Hyde Packet company, which he brightened enormously with his glowing, optimistic enthusiasm. Utterbourne, from the first, of course, looked upon Flora’s new friend as a figure of comedy; nevertheless it only showed a little in the quivering of his lips; and he knew of a skipper, he said—a Captain Bearman—who might be prevailed upon to take hold, in case he happened to be without a ship just now.
Luck was kind. Captain Bearman was very much without a ship, and, in his own rather acid fashion, seized almost avidly upon the opportunity at hand. His fashion, it developed, was full of snarls and shrouded in a rind of perpetual crustiness. But he was an authentic sea captain, notwithstanding, and the impresario rejoiced over him ardently.
A little dinner was arranged at the Pavillon d’Orient—an Armenian resort famous for its skewered meats and imported cheeses. Utterbourne actually came himself, and brought Bearman along; while, out of the warm abundance of his generosity the impresario invited a certain young clerk of his acquaintance. (“He’s got such a shut-in, humdrum look.”) And there was champagne, which more or less went to the clerk’s head, and made him feel, for the time-being, a person of considerable consequence.
Naturally Utterbourne talked of everything under the sun except the subject that had brought them together. He spoke poisingly of fate and art and habit and flayed immortality within an inch of its life and said “H’m?” a great many times and hummed To a Wild Rose. And when, later on, Curry referred to the merchandise which the Skipping Goone would carry by way of defraying expenses as a “sideline,” then Utterbourne drawled over his shish kébab: “It’s to be presumed we all have our sidelines, of one sort and another—h’m? With some it’s gambling, with others art, literature, some branch of scientific research—h’m? With most of us, perhaps, it’s just women”—more sea captain atmosphere.
But Curry staunchly defended his sideline—said it had come to him in Oshkosh while he was directing the last act of the Gondoliers one night—really an inspiration, nothing short of that! And Utterbourne said “Yes,” while the other captain, out of a flaming profusion of auburn whiskers, echoed it: “Er—yes,” with a most curious, quick little side-glance of his narrow green eyes, which somehow instantly set him down as a satellite.
Captain Bearman was big and bluff-looking, with the sea quite oozing from his whole personality; there was even a little gold braid, and, in spite of some rather doubtful cuffs, he looked like an admiral; yet for all that it was only too plain he fawned on Captain Utterbourne—and fawned very acutely. He couldn’t seem to be obsequious and echoing enough—it was rather baffling. He would always echo: “Er—yes,” or “Er—no,” as the case might be, and ordered all the dishes the other captain ordered, and, in brief, took the cue from him in everything.
At first Utterbourne by no means went out of his way to avoid conveying the impression that the project of the Skipping Goone was unseaworthy; and Captain Bearman, simply because he possessed what the psychologists call an “inferiority complex,” and though it might mean a lapsing of his present opportunity, made his embittered lips curl in sympathetic disdain. But as the impresario climbed to higher and ever higher levels of honest zeal, gradually Utterbourne thawed somewhat, leaning negligently back, his knife prying about the base of his goblet, often rather gravely menacing its equilibrium; and at once, of course, the other captain began to thaw too. From that time on the prospects were ever so much better.
Of course Xenophon Curry was an enthusiast, and of course the champagne had made him exhort a good deal about the supreme virtue of his songbirds (“It’s not that they’ve all got million dollar voices, for I can’t keep that kind; but they’ve all got million dollar hearts!”) And of course he talked a little wildly about his great dream—New York and the capitals of Europe.... Yet the serene and glacial Captain Utterbourne felt in spite of himself a little touched, and merely thought it expedient at last to observe, his voice slipping out between reluctant lips like a thin ribbon of lazy ice: “You must take care, Mr. Curry—h’m?—not to let a possible material success ... I mean,” he cleared his throat with faint petulance, “you mustn’t let your sideline turn you into a rival of ours rather than of Gatti Cassazza’s.”
It was finally settled, and Bearman became the master of the Skipping Goone, and the radiant impresario, as he hailed a taxi for the entire party by way of ending the evening in a blaze of style, cried: “The schooner will turn the trick—you’ll see!”
In a word, it was nothing short of a triumph.